Julie Walters

“I felt my mother about the place. I don't think she haunts me, but I wouldn't put it past her.”

“Oh all the time when Victoria Wood and I did our series. There were people asking 'Can women be funny?' People still ask that. It's like asking: 'Can women breathe in and out?'”

“It wasn't being an alcoholic - it was going wild. It happened when I got famous. It was like having my teens in my early thirties: blotting out your life, not having to think about anything.”

“I don't want to give up acting - it's what I am.”

“I'll tell you how it happened. The phone rang. Paul, my agent, goes, 'Would you like to play Meryl Streep's?' I said, 'Yeeees! I'll do it, whatever it is.' He said, 'It's Mamma Mia!.' I said, 'Oh no, which character? The fat friend?”

“I was always someone who lived in the future all the time, it was always the next thing - dreams of escape.”

“Everyone comes up to me saying, 'Cooee, Julie! Hello!' as if I know them. Of course I don't bloody know them. Am I flummoxed by it? Sometimes. I think, 'Ooh, love, go easy.' For a time, I did feel this pressure that I had to be funny, but it passes.”

“I couldn't watch Tom and Jerry. The cruelty was too much. I had all these strange images, of tiny animals, all mixed up.”

“The way I relax is I think, 'I haven't got anything coming up.' I like to know there are months ahead when I've got nothing.”

“I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.”

“I wanted above all else not to be like my mum.”

“Some people have a terrible stretch between family and work. It is a difficult thing to achieve.”

“I went through bits of the 60s and thought myself a bit of a hippy.”

“Debate is so much better than denial.”

“I was the little, funny one. I felt I was the child among grown women.”

“You can't help but feel a little bit like a mother to the younger cast members.”

“Stage is the most exciting. Film is lovely, because it's like a family.”

“Suddenly, you are very much in the present, and you learn it's really the place where you should always live.”

“Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.”

“I never had any acting heroes. I never really went to the theatre.”